2012 Speaker Bios

SCOTT CROW

Scott Crow is a community organizer, writer, strategist and speaker who advocates the philosophy and practices of anarchism for social, environmental, and economic aims. For almost two decades he has continued to use his experience and ideas in co-founding and co-organizing numerous radical grassroots projects in Texas, including Treasure City Thrift, Radical Encuentro Camp, UPROAR (United People Resisting Oppression and Racism), Dirty South Earth First! and the Common Ground Collective, the largest anarchist-influenced organization in modern U.S. history to date.

In addition to grassroots organizing, he has worked for regional and national organizations, including Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, Ruckus Society and A.C.O.R.N. With his partner, he produced the documentary film, Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation. These political activities lead to him being labeled a “domestic terrorist” by the FBI beginning in the late 90s with investigations that continued for almost a decade.

His writings have appeared in various radical print magazines and online sites over the last decade, including in the anthology What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation, (South End Press: 2006). His latest book, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground Collective, (PM Press), is a memoir of his work in New Orleans.

ALLAN ANTLIFF

Allan Antliff, Canada Research Chair, University of Victoria, Canada, is art editor for the UK-based journal Anarchist Studies, and editor of the “Art & Anarchy” issue of Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies (2011). He has published two books on anarchism and the arts and edited Only A Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology. Allan is Director of the Anarchist Archive, University of Victoria, (www.library.uvic.ca/dig/AnarchistArchive/), a member of the Camas Books collective, (www.camas.ca), and the Victoria Anarchist Bookfair collective (www.victoriaanarchistbookfair.ca).

DAVID CUNNINGHAM

David Cunningham is an antagonist from east Vancouver. Writing zines and posting on the blog, momentofinsurrection.wordpress.com, he also participates in the art of agitative theatre. Autonomous acts have been played out in the streets, skid row bars, occupied city hall, a hobo jungle, picket lines and barricades.

DANA WARD

Dana Ward is Professor of Political Studies at Pitzer College, Claremont, CA, founder and curator of Anarchy Archives, an online research center on anarchist history and thought, and author of several articles on anarchism.

RICHARD BRETTELL

Dr. Richard Brettell recently curated the exhibition, “Pisarro’s People,” which focuses on the influence of Camille Pissarro’s anarchism on his depictions of social life and labor. He is author of numerous books about Modern Art, including Modern Art 1851-1929: Capitalism and Representation. Dr. Richard Brettell is the Margaret McDermott Distinguished Professor of Art and Aesthetics at The University of Texas at Dallas. He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Yale University. Prior to joining The University of Texas at Dallas, Professor Brettell taught at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, Yale University, and Harvard University.

CINDY MILSTEIN

Cindy Milstein is an active participant in Occupy Philly and an Institute for Anarchist Studies board member. She has been involved in numerous anarchist projects, ranging from the U.S. Social Forum’s “New World From Below” convergence and “Renewing the Anarchist Tradition” conference, to Black Sheep Books collective in Vermont, and Station 40 collective in San Francisco, to the anarchist summer school known as The Institute for Social Ecology. She’s the author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations, (AK Press, 2010), and co-author with Erik Ruin of Paths Toward Utopia: Explorations in Everyday Anarchism, (PM Press, 2012).

MAIA RAMNATH

Maia Ramnath currently teaches global histories for NYU’s Draper Interdisciplinary Humanities and Social Thought Program. She is the author of Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire. She will be discussing her latest work, Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle. She works with Adalah-NY, Historians Against War, the NYC Anarchist Book Fair organizing committee, and South Asia Solidarity Initiative.

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Jeffrey St. Clair is an investigative journalist, writer and editor. He is the co-editor, with Alexander Cockburn, of the political newsletter CounterPunch, and a contributing editor to the monthly magazine In These Times. He has also written for The Washington Post, The San Francisco Examiner, The Nation and The Progressive. His reporting focuses on the politics surrounding environmental and military issues. He has worked as an environmental organizer and writer for Friends of the Earth, Clean Water Action Project, and the Hoosier Environmental Council.

In 1998, he published his first book, co-written with Cockburn, Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press, a history of the CIA’s ties to drug gangs from World War II to the Mujahideen and Nicaraguan Contras. This was followed by A Field Guide to Environmental Bad Guys, (with James Ridgeway), Five Days that Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond, Al Gore: a User’s Manual, Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature, and Born Under a Bad Sky: Notes from the Dark Side of the Earth.

WOLF EDWARDS

Wolf Edwards is a contemporary sound composer based in Victoria, BC whose work is performed frequently in Canada and internationally. Edwards is the recipient of many awards and prizes including the 2004 Canada Council for the Arts/Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Jules Leger Competition for New Chamber Music, (third place), the 2002-2003 Molinari Quartet International, (third place), the 2001 Strings of the Future International Composition Competition, (first place), as well as the Murray Adaskin Prize in Composition in 1997.

From 1999 to 2006 Edwards gave lectures, participated in, and had his music performed at many international festivals and events throughout North America and Continental Europe. His works have been performed and/or commissioned by the Arditti Quartet, (London), the Quatuor Molinari, (Montréal), the Victoria Symphony, (Victoria), the Aventa Ensemble, (Victoria), the Sofia Soloists, (Sofia, Bulgaria), Quasar Quatuor de Saxophones, (Montréal), L’Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal, L’Ensemble Chorum, (Montréal), and Bozzini Quartet, (Montréal).

SANDRA JEPPESON

Sandra Jeppesen is Assistant Professor of Media Studies and English Literature in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department, Lakehead University, Orillia, Canada. She has been a zine-maker, activist and writer for many years. Her academic work on alternative media and direct-action activism has appeared in journals such as Sexualities, and the Canadian Journal of Communication, and has contributed chapters on anarchist theory to Post-Anarchism: A Reader, (2011), New Perspectives On Anarchism, (2010), and Constituent Imagination, (2007).

JOSHUA FRANK

Joshua Frank is an environmental journalist and the author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush. He is co-editor, with Jeffrey St. Clair, of Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland. Frank and St. Clair are also the authors of the book, Green Scare: The New War on Environmentalism.

NAT SMITH

Nat Smith is a light-skinned Black queer gender variant nerd who loves camping, comics, animals, sci-fi, mathematical equations and is proof that none of these things is antithetical to being from the ‘hood. Known to associate with such dangerous organizations as Critical Resistance, Trans/Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project, you can find Nat casually dropping the “PIC abolition” bomb all while in line for wings.

DERIC SHANNON

Deric Shannon received his B.A. and M.A. in Sociology from Ball State University and his PhD in Sociology from the University of Connecticut. He is currently an Associate Professor at Quinebach Valley Community College. He authored “Anarchism, Communism, and Socialism” in the Encyclopedia of Modern Revolutions, (James Defronzo, ed.), and is co-editor of Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Reader of Anarchy in the Academy, (Routeledge). He will be participating in a discussion of the book, Accumulation of Freedom: Anarchist Writings on Economics.

RANDALL AMSTER

The author Anarchism Today of a new volume on anarchism explores its vivid history and its resurgent relevance for addressing today’s most pressing social and environmental issues. The presentation includes a reflective assessment of anarchism’s impact and the constructive role it can play in building a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world.

Randall Amster, J.D., Ph.D., is the graduate chair of humanities at Prescott College and serves as executive director of the Peace & Justice Studies Association. Among his recent books are Lost in Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness and the co-edited volume Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchism in the Academy.

SASHA LILLEY

Sasha Lilley is a writer and radio broadcaster. She’s the co-founder and host of the critically acclaimed program of radical ideas, Against the Grain. While program director of KPFA Radio, the flagship station of the Pacifica Network, she headed up such award-winning national broadcasts as “Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan.” Sasha is the series editor of PM Press’ political economy imprint, Spectre—which owes more to Karl Marx than James Bond—and is the author of Capital and Its Discontents. Her co-authored book Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth will be published by PM Press in the autumn of 2012.

GEORGE KATSIAFICAS

George Katsiaficas is author or editor of eleven books, including ones on the global uprising of 1968 and European social movements. Together with Kathleen Cleaver, he co-edited Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. A longtime activist for peace and justice, he was a student of Herbert Marcuse. Currently, he is based at Chonnam National University in Gwangju, South Korea, and at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston.

PETER LINEBAUGH

Peter Linebaugh is the author of The London Hanged (London: Penguin, 1991), The Magna Carta Manifesto (University of California Press, 2008), and with Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra (Beacon Press, 2000). He has written introductions to a book of Thomas Paine’s writing (Verso, 2009) and to a new edition of E.P. Thompson’s, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (PM Press, 2011). He works at the University of Toledo in Ohio.

IAIN BOAL

Iain Boal is an Irish social historian of science and technics, affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley and Birkbeck College, London. He is associated with the Retort group, and is one of the co-authors of Retort’s Afflicted Power: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso). He co-edited with James Brook Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (City Lights), and is author of The Green Machine (Notting Hill Editions), a brief planetary history of the bicycle.

ANDREJ GRUBACIC

Andrej Grubacic is an anarchist dissident and historian who has written prolifically on anarchism and the history of the Balkans. He is a lecturer at the ZMedia Institute and University of San Francisco.

Following the collapse of Yugoslavia, Grubacic was based in Belgrade, before leaving his position as assistant lecturer of History at the University of Belgrade (due to tensions relating to his political activism) and relocating to the Fernand Braudel Center at SUNY Binghamton in New York, United States where he taught in the Sociology department. Grubacic is founding member of the Global Balkans network of the Balkan anti-capitalist diaspora, the Yugoslav Initiative for Economic Democracy, Kontrapunkt magazine, and ZBalkans – a Balkan edition of Z Magazine on whose editorial board he also sits. He is or has been active as an anarchist organizer in networks such as Planetary Alternatives Network, the post-Yugoslav coalition of anti-authoritarian collectives DSM!, Peoples Global Action, the World Social Forum, Freedom Fight and, most recently, as a program director for the Global Commons.

His works include books in Balkan languages, chapters and numerous articles related to the history and utopian present of the Balkans.

His affinity towards anarchism arose as a result of his experiences as a member of the Belgrade Libertarian Group that derives from the Yugoslav Praxis experiment.

ALEXANDER AKIN

Alexander Akin had his first experience abroad at the age of 15 in North Korea, as a delegate to the World Festival of Youth and Students. This startling experience led him to the study of East Asian history and languages as an anthropology student at UC Riverside, interrupted by occasional weekend trips to get arrested at the Nuclear Test Site in Nevada. His fieldwork studying Hui Muslims in Beijing led to Harvard, where (after much backpacking through Asia and other interruptions) he finished his PhD in 2009. Aside from brief stints teaching at Brandeis and at the Roxbury Latin School, he has spent most of his time since then at Bolerium Books in San Francisco as a bibliographer and independent scholar. He has published articles on topics ranging from Mongol imperial currency to the journal of Du Huan, a Chinese voyager to medieval Iraq, and was the editor of the English translation of “The Artistry of Korean Cartography,” published by Tamal Vista Publications. He is currently researching the activities of the Chinese-American Democratic Youth League in San Francisco and the FBI’s surveillance of its members.

CLAUDE MARKS

Claude Marks is the Director of the Freedom Archives and a former political prisoner. He produces documentaries and does ongoing prison justice organizing.

Panel Speaker Bios

Panel: It’s All Your Fault!
Anarchism, Surrealism, Sex, and the Revolution of Everyday Life.
Occupy your world or …..

V. VALE

V. Vale is an adventurer in the world of the fantastic and the bizarre. Editor and founder of the punk magazine Search and Destroy, he now edits the journal RE/Search, known for its insight on counterculture and special issues on William S. Burroughs, Pranks and Modern Primitives. He has interviewed Lawrence Ferlinghetti and J.G. Ballard and currently has an interview show on Channel 29. www.researchpubs.com

WINSTON SMITH

Winston Smith is a collagist extraordinaire. With X-ray vision he creates unforgettable images that burn themselves into the mind, overturn ideas, and yet, are unsurpassed in humor. His work has appeared on the covers of Dead Kennedys albums, and books of his collages are published by San Francisco’s Last Gasp Press. www.lastgasp.com and www.winstonsmith.com

RON SAKOLSKY

Ron Sakolsky is a stateless radio pirate with a penchant for turning the airwaves upside down and an anarcho-surrealist bank robber in search of popular accomplices. Some of his recent books include Surrealist Subversions, (Autonomedia), Creating Anarchy, (Fifth Estate), and Swift Winds, (Eberhardt).

PENELOPE ROSEMONT

Penelope Rosemont explores the jungles of surrealism and searches for the secrets of lost civilizations. She has been active in international surrealism. Her books include Dreams & Everyday Life, (Kerr Co), Surrealist Women, ed. (UTexas Press), and a monograph, Lost Worlds, Forgotten Futures, Undreamed Ecstasies. www.charleshkerr.com and www.surrealistmovement-usa.org

Process and Political Culture: Anarchism in Montreal

CRAC is a feminist anti-authoritarian/anarchist research collective in Montreal studying our own movement. We have interviewed over 100 participants in anti-capitalist, queer, anti-racist, anti-colonial, feminist and environmental groups and networks. Although these groups and networks might seem unrelated, we are united by a shared political culture and vision of revolutionary social change as a process that takes place through political grass-roots networks, mutually supported campaigns, housing collectives, shared resources, activist spaces, and social events.

Within the milieu in Montreal and within our affinity groups, this means that we have developed anti-oppression strategies for sharing power and radicalizing our thinking and actions. One group summed this up as queering anarchism and anarchizing queer movements, which might also apply to race, colonialism, feminism and the environment. In other words, rooted within anarchism, anti-racist, feminist, queer, and anti-colonialist groups, networks and individuals have had a huge impact on the anarchistmovement in Montreal.

Questions for discussion: Is this an apt portrait of the anarchist movement more broadly? How does this vision of our movement (as shared political culture and revolutionary process) help us to develop strategies and understand or evaluate successes and failures so that we do not become the fragmented disconnected movement the mainstream sees us as? And how might it be important in understanding what is happening in the Occupy movement today?

Presentors: Sandra Jeppenson and Anna Kruzynski, Research Group on Collective Autonomy (CRAC), Montreal.

Love And Struggle: David Gilbert, SDS, and the Weather Underground Panel: Terry Bisson and TBA

TERRY BISON

Terry Bisson, who was for many years a Kentuckian living in New York City, is now a New Yorker living in California. In addition to his Hugo and Nebula award winning science fiction, he has written bios of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Nat Turner. He is also the host of a popular San Francisco reading series (SFinSF) and the Editor of PM’s new Outspoken Authors pocketbook series.

DONNA WILLMOTT

Donna Willmott was part of the WUO, and later spent 10 years as part of a clandestine anti-imperialist network. She was in prison in the mid-nineties forher activities in support of the Puerto Rican independence movement,and has done work in support of political prisoners and prisoners rights since her release.

ARI CLEMENZI

Ari Clemenzi is a working class anti-imperialist organizer and educator who has been mentored by David Gilbert (among other great folks). Ari is a collective staff member of Catalyst Project, an anti-racist political education and movement building center based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Pat Murphy is the author of the classic post-apocalyptic novel of the Bay Area, The City, Not Long After. She is a founder of the prestigious Tiptree Award for feminist science fiction.

JOHN SHIRLEY

John Shirley is the author of numerous novels, books of stories, as well as movie and television scripts, and one nonfiction book. His book Black Butterflies won the Bram Stoker Award as best horror story collection of the year. He was one of the original cyberpunk writers, and is known for the sharp political edges in his fiction. His newest novel is Everything is Broken, from Prime Books.

Trina Robbins fought her way into the male-dominated world of underground commix. Her first fully fleshed-out characters and strips appeared in the late sixties in the pages of East Village Other. She left New York at the end of the 1969 for San Francisco, where she worked briefly at the Berkeley Tribe and It Ain’t Me, Babe. After putting together the first all-women comic book, It Ain’t Me Babe Comix, she became increasingly involved in promoting and creating outlets for female comics artists through projects such as the comics anthology Wimmen’s Comix. Robbins is considered the expert on the subject of early-twentieth-century women cartoonists, and is responsible for rediscovering many brilliant but previously forgotten women cartoonists in her books, A Century of Women Cartoonists, From Girls to Grrrls, and The Great Women Cartoonists. Her vast collection of original art by early-twentieth-century women cartoonists has been exhibited in Germany, Austria, Portugal, Spain, and Japan, as well as in the United States. She has produced collections of the work of some of these women: golden age cartoonist Lily Renee, comic strip artist Tarpe Mills, and the great Nell Brinkley. www.trinarobbins.com

BILLY X JENNINGS

Billy X Jennings grew up in San Diego and moved to Oakland in June 1968. He was Huey Newton’s assistant and a member of the Black Panther Party from 1968 to 1974. He currently works as the Black Panther Party archivist, running the website itsabouttimebpp.com and working to preserve the true history of the Black Panther Party through education.

Selma James is a women’s rights and anti-racist campaigner and author. From 1958 to 1962, she worked with CLR James in the movement for Caribbean federation and independence. In 1972, she founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign, and in 2000 she helped launch the Global Women’s Strike whose strategy for change is Invest in Caring not Killing. She coined the word “unwaged” to describe the caring work women do, and it has since entered the English language to describe all who work without wages on the land, in the home, in the community . . . In 1975, she became the first spokeswoman of the English Collective of Prostitutes. She is a founding member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (2008). She co-authored the classic The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community which launched the “domestic labour debate.” She has addressed the power relations within the working class movement, and how to organize across sectors despite divisions of sex, race and class, South and North.

Other publications include A Woman’s Place (1952), Women, the Unions and Work, or what is not to be done (1972), Sex, Race and Class (1974), Wageless of the World (1974), The Rapist Who Pays the Rent (1982 co-author), The Ladies and the Mammies – Jane Austen and Jean Rhys (1983), Marx and Feminism (1983), Hookers in the House of the Lord (1983), Strangers & Sisters: Women, Race and Immigration (1985 Ed & Introduction), The Global Kitchen: The Case for Counting Unwaged work (1985 and 1995), The Milk of Human Kindness: Defending Breastfeeding from the AIDS Industry and the Global Market (co-author, 2005).

JUDY GUMBO ALBERT

Judy Gumbo Albert is completing her memoir Yippie Girl: My Romantic Adventures in the Awesome and Awful 1960s. Judy is an original Yippie. The Yippies ran a pig for President in Chicago in 1968 as a send up of the electoral process. Judy worked at the Berkeley Barb and was a founder of the Berkeley Tribe. In her later life, Judy was Vice President of Development at Planned Parenthood in Oregon where she got to apply the skills she learned in the underground press to write highly successful fundraising appeals. She and her late husband Stew Albert are authors of The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade.

Twenty-Three Shades Of Black: Kenneth Wishnia

KENNETH WISHNIA

Kenneth Wishnia’s novels include 23 Shades of Black, an Edgar and Anthony Award finalist; Soft Money, a Library Journal Best Mystery of the Year; and Red House, a Washington Post Book World “Rave” Book of the Year. His short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Queens Noir, Politics Noir, and elsewhere. His latest novel, The Fifth Servant, has been nominated for the “Premio Letterario Adei-Wizo” by the Italian chapter of the Woman’s International Zionist Organization. He teaches writing, literature and other deviant forms of thought at Suffolk Community College on Long Island.

Cal Winslow, PhD, is author of Labor’s Civil War in California: The NUHW Healthcare Workers’ Rebellion (PM Press, 2010) and an active supporter of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), believing that “an injury to one is an injury for all.” He writes first-hand accounts of their battles for CounterPunch. He is an historian trained at Antioch College and Warwick University, at Warwick under the direction of the late Edward Thompson. He is a coauthor with Thompson and others of Albion’s Fatal Tree (Penguin and Pantheon, 1975). He edited Waterfront Workers: New Perspectives on Race and Class (University of Illinois Press, 1998) and coedited Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from the Below in the Long 1970s (Verso 2010). He is a coeditor with Iain Boal, Janferie Stone and Michael Watts of the forthcoming West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California (PM Press 2011).He is a fellow in Environmental Politics at UC Berkeley and is Director of the Mendocino Institute. He is a founding member of Mendocino Parents for Peace and is associated with the Bay Area collective Retort. He lives with his family near Caspar on the Mendocino Coast.

Nick Mamatas is the author of three novels, including the Lovecraftian Beat road novel Move Under Ground, and Under My Roof, a novel of neighborhood nuclear supremacy. With Brian Keene he wrote The Damned Highway and with Ellen Datlow edited the anthology Haunted Legends. His how-to pamphlet on writing, Starve Better, was released in March 2010.

Nick has also published over seventy short stories and hundreds of articles. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Mississippi Review Online, subTERRAIN, Hint Fiction, Supernatural Noir and other venues, and a number of his stories were collected in the book You Might Sleep . . . His reportage and essays have appeared in the Village Voice, The Smart Set, Clamor, In These Times, the books You Are Being Lied To and Everything You Know is Wrong, H+, Poets & Writers, The Writer and many many other places.

He was born in New York and now lives in California with a woman named Olivia and a dog named Kazzie.

MICHAEL HARRIS

Michael Harris grew up in a little railroad town in Northern California, in the loom of Mt. Shasta, whose mystic influence shadowed him from the University of Oregon to Harvard to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. An Army veteran of Vietnam, he has worked as a Forest Service aide, a janitor and an English conversation teacher in Tokyo. For 30 years, he was a reporter, editor and book reviewer for West Coast newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. Like his alter ego, Harry Hudson, he stutters and is a gloomy cuss. He lives with his wife in Long Beach; they have a grown son. The Chieu Hoi Saloon is his first novel.

OWEN HILL

Owen Hill was born and raised in an industrial suburb of Los Angeles. He knocked around a fair bit– baggage service at LAX, union rep, warehouse drone, janitor, “paid” political volunteer, ice cream maker—and other forms of boredom (as a poet said) advertised as poetry.

Landed in the Bay Area where he worked in several bookstores, finally settling into Moe’s in Berkeley as a buyer and events coordinator.

Had written poetry since puberty but had been shy about calling himself a poet. After taking a workshop with Tom Clark at UC extension he came to believe that poetry was his calling. He has since published seven slim volumes of poetry and read his poems at various venues around the country.

His first novel, The Chandler Apartments, was written in Berkeley, in the building so named. At the time he was convalescing from a life-threatening disease in the confines of The Chandler. The novel began as a satire, poking fun at the characters that inhabit the Bay Area poetry scene. It morphed into a murder mystery and became the first of the series featuring poet detective Clay Blackburn.

Currently in good health, he is working on the fourth Clay Blackburn mystery. The second, The Incredible Double, is just out from PM Press.

SUMMER BRENNER

Summer Brenner was raised in Georgia and drifted northeast to Boston, over the Atlantic, out west to New Mexico, and eventually to the Bay Area where she has been a long-time resident.

Currently, she works in Richmond, California, focusing on literacy and youth. She is author of a dozen books of poetry and fiction, including the noir thriller from PM, I-5, A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex; and short story collection, My Life in Clothes. Forthcoming from PM is Nearly Nowhere, first published in France by Gallimard’s la serie noire.

Works for young people include Richmond Tales, Lost Secrets of the Iron Triangle, winner of 2010 Historic Preservation award from the City of Richmond; and recently from Reach & Teach/PM, IVY, Homeless in San Francisco, Silver Award Winner for the Children’s Literary Classics Book Awards in the category of pre-teen fiction.

Ivy, Homless in San Francisco also was recently awarded the Bronze medal in the Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards, in the category of pre-teen fiction.

Rad Dad Panel: Tomas Moniz and Jeremy Smith

TOMAS MONIZ

Tomas Moniz is the founder, editor, and a writer for the award winning zine Rad Dad. Looking for radical parenting community, he created Rad Dad to provide the space for parents (particularly fathers) to share, commiserate and plan with each other, and to support each other in challenging patriarchy one diaper at a time. As China Martens has said, “Tomas has been the most vocal voice within zines, trying to start and keep a discussion within this aspect of radical politics and parenthood.” His writing has been included in many zines about parenting as well as in the books My Mother Wears Combat Boots and Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind.

He’s been making zines since the late ’90s, and his most current project is the serialized zine novella, Without Words & Without Kneeling, which began in September 2010 and will continue a chapter a month for twelve months. As Jami Sailor, longtime zinemaker, explained, “I enjoyed Without Words & Without Kneeling and am impressed with Moniz’s concept. I really love seeing zinemakers expand on the current concepts and definitions of what constitutes a zine.”

He is helping to raise three children and lives with a menagerie of animals in Berkeley, California.

JEREMY ADAM SMITH

Jeremy Adam Smith writes about parenting, science and technology, popular culture, urban life, and politics—sometimes all of them at once.

He is author of The Daddy Shift (Beacon Press, 2009), which the San Francisco Chronicle calls “amazing,” author Michael Kimmel calls “impassioned [and] insightful,” and the New York Times praises as “a chronicle of a time . . . we will look back upon as the start of permanent change.” He is also the co-editor of two science anthologies: The Compassionate Instinct (W.W. Norton & Co., 2010) and Are We Born Racist? (Beacon Press, 2010).

Currently, Jeremy is a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. He the founding editor of the award-winning Shareable.net; former senior editor of Greater Good magazine, which was nominated for multiple Maggie and Independent Press awards during his tenure; and founder of Daddy Dialectic, one of the most authoritative dad blogs on the web.

Jeremy’s essays, short stories, and articles have appeared in Mothering, The Nation, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Utne Reader, Wired, and numerous other periodicals and books.